True Colors

The janitor on the moon

Would that the man on the moon were a lonely fellow, perhaps reclining against the slope of some great crater, he might say that he had more insight under the print of his thumb than all of the Earthling extrospection gleamed from upon the snowy vantage of Everest. Perhaps he fingers the collapsing edges of the first human manprint in the silty soil or sweeps away the gunmetal baby powder from the brassy words, “For All Mankind.”

Laborious cleaning of the human remnants sustains the mind while waiting for the next icy immigrant to plummet in and spread more work. For what is a day when circling the Earth but that which is measured by the push and pull of an Earthrise and Earthset?

The humans, so saturated with their colors, unable to describe his gray world, leave behind their red, white and blue flag, now just a sun-bleached white, flying against an imagined wind in this airless void. Let them come and re-calibrate to stars with more detail and color against an ink sky than in all the speckles of sunlight off of their great seas and rivers.

Their glowing oasis of blue, a single source of color in a vast darkness, implies how much the man is missing as he floats alone, barely denting the sifted peaks. A pocked white sphere lies half buried in this crater, a miniature of this moon. Lots of footprints to sweep up before the next visit. The man reclines against the slope of a golden leg, the only Earthly color for miles against the billion shades of gray that occupy the man’s day.

What a day on the moon one has when measured in the waxing and waning of the attention of billions so close, and yet so far.